Since DrupalCon North America earlier this year, the Drupal Association's Engineering and Infrastructure team has been more involved than ever in strategic initiatives affecting Drupal. They're still doing the great work they normally do to keep Drupal.org online and the project's infrastructure up and running and secure, but they're also working on crucial efforts to move the product itself forward.
It's a significant impact from a small but mighty team of 4 engineers.
The most important initiatives of the Drupal Association are listed below.
Drupal Steward:
Drupal Steward is a globally distributed web application firewall that can protect your customers' Drupal sites in the event of a critical vulnerability.
Learn more at Drupal Steward
For qualifying security releases, Drupal Steward will give you peace of mind and the ability to schedule the update on your own time instead of scrambling your entire team.
This will further enhance Drupal's excellent security posture and may prove to be a differentiator.
Project Messaging in Core
The Drupal Association has spearheaded a funded initiative to add a Drupal.org ad feed directly into Drupal core. This will allow for a communication channel to reach Drupal end users directly.
With Drupal 8 reaching end of life in November 2021 and Drupal 7 ending its life in November 2022, communicating with these end users is more critical than ever.
For this reason, we invite you to collaborate with the Drupal core team to discuss important migration messages, updates, and other announcements.
Automatic updates initiative
The Drupal Association has been involved in the automatic updates initiative for the past few years. Still, as it gets closer to being ready for customer use, it has funded support to help them secure the update supply chain using the TUF specification .
Automatic updates are a long-requested feature. They provide reduced cost of ownership for site owners, better acceptance of new feature releases, and a better security posture for sites overall.
Ensuring that the updates delivered are genuine and secure is a crucial element of this initiative.
GitLab Acceleration
At DrupalCon North America 2021, Dries announced an acceleration of the move from Drupal.org to GitLab. Since then, we’ve been documenting contributor workflows, assessing our resource needs, and writing a project plan .
While Drupal.org is already supported by GitLab and has enabled merge requests since November 2020, by leaning on “out of the box” GitLab workflows, we hope to reduce friction for new contributors, especially those already using GitHub or GitLab in your daily jobs.
Project Navigator
The other big initiative announced in the #Dries Note was the project browser initiative . The Drupal Association hosts all metadata about Drupal extensions on Drupal.org, so this initiative requires that Drupal.org be prepared to provide the data needed for the project browser to work.
A project browser and installer integrated directly into the Drupal admin interface will improve the experience for site builders and provide an easier path for new developers to begin their journey with Drupal.
Preparing for Drupal 8 End of Life
Drupal 8 reaches end of life in November 2021, and many of you have heard that contracts for site updates are coming in quickly.
The engineering team is facilitating the process in 2 ways:
- Provide a “relaxed” composer façade that will allow users to install D8 modules on D9, even if they have not been updated for official compatibility.
- The DA has also opened issues with many of the contributed modules that have not been updated, causing module maintainers to perform the final update or allow other maintainers to adopt modules.
Upgrading Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is much easier than any previous Drupal version upgrade; however, the module ecosystem is still a factor.
These initiatives led by the Drupal Association engineering team are helping the ecosystem of module maintainers update and prepare for the transition.
Contribution Credit Recognition Updates
The Drupal.org Contribution Recognition System has received several updates over the past two quarters:
Users can now add “ Contributor roles ” to their profiles and the credit companies that sponsor them.
No-code projects and new or niche projects with low usage amounts have received a credit boost. No contribution is worth less than “1” credit.
Credit for case studies has been adjusted to reflect that we now need Drupal 9 stories, and soon Drupal 10!
Drupal has been a pioneer in recognizing open source contributions. We are the first project to systematically recognize organizational and non-code contributions. We're breaking ground in understanding how to manage recognition incentives to focus community efforts on the things that matter most.
Increase in engineering team
Wow, that's a lot of work, isn't it?
It sure is, which is why the Drupal Association is hiring to expand its engineering team over the next 12 months to help accelerate some of these key projects.
It's a small, powerful team, but the sooner we can get some of these key initiatives done, the more significant the impact on the ecosystem will be.
It's your support that makes this possible, so thank you!